don’t quit before the miracle happens

will elope if unsupervised in public

puts everything in his mouth

always awake when you want him to go to sleep

zero impulse control

thinks he conveys his thoughts clearly, only to discover people understand at best 80% of what he says

does something he knows is wrong and pointedly makes eye contact with you as he does so

confidently tells you exactly what is going on regardless of whether or not he actually knows what’s going on

makes jokes that are only funny because he thinks they’re funny

brings his favorite person special gifts which may or may not be literal garbage

considers “personal space” to be approximately two centimeters away from you

I got to try some new archery, and I LOVE IT!

Scully looked almost like she’d seen a ghost, and he should know; he’d seen her after she’d seen one. Her fingers flexed on the back of one of her high wooden chairs. “It’s because I haven’t been getting enough zinc.” She swallowed. “Isn’t it.” 

When he stepped toward her she kept the chair between them. She could break his heart if she weren’t so busy scaring the shit out of him.

He tried, “Scully.”

The low, sibilant way she used to take to like a body to water, in the middle of the night, in the flail of some nightmare: Where is my weapon. Did I take enough zinc. And -- Scully, till she sagged with it. Her muscles going long against her bones, which had gone still against his. Scully, alright Scully. Asleep in his arms untense as an exhausted swimmer. 

But now she was rigid. And her eyes were so open, he could see straight to the very blue bottom of her confusion, which was something terrible and true.

“No,” she said. “Don’t do that.” One hand went to her mouth and the other to her chest. Like she was going to throw up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. “Oh my god,” she said, all but doubled over with it. “Please don’t do this to me.” 

She hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked, though he’d hardly knocked. The buzz of anonymous highway had been in him, dirt still in his hair, and he’d realized on the walk up to her apartment that he was wearing a rather nice suit, probably Armani.

It was all too strange, even by his generous measure. He’d woken up under a slice of clear blue rectangle in North Carolina that morning. In his gums, it made his teeth ache.

And then there was Scully.

Don’t do this to me, that’s what she’d said when he’d come in the door, too, bolting upright on her couch, scrabbling for her service weapon. Had she been asleep? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. It was, per the gas station calendar as he’d hitched statelines, a Tuesday. Her hair had been a fright. There were bruises under her eyes as purple as any cadaver’s little finger.  

He’d thought — what had he thought? What was he supposed to think? She was Scully. The steps were quite simple: If things were strange, he found Scully. Sometimes, yes, it took a moment to travel from point A to point B. Sometimes there were many smaller steps between those two essential ones. But the fact remained that, in ketamine dreams or the throes of self-imposed psychodementia, the buck stopped with Scully. Once he found her, some broader leap toward not-strangeness, or at the very least a better kind of strange, could almost always reliably be made. 

Except this was worse, undeniably. Scully cornered across her kitchen where she’d flown after failing to locate her gun. It was not so much that she seemed afraid. The first thing she’d said, before imploring him that she could not take it, had been his name. And she’d said it just like she always had, with a tugging in it, a slur that was like closing a distance. It sounded exactly like the buck still stopped at her front door. 

“Please,” she was saying still, but she had stopped looking at him, sobbing to the hard wood and pale tile floor. “I don’t know—”

“Scully,” he said, in a different way, older and more urgent. “It’s me. It is me.” 

And damn if her face didn’t snap right up to his again. Yes. The echo and aftershock of recognition. His Scully of the basement office and the connected motel room door. Since forever, his assigned seat-mate, his stalwart, his level best. The dutiful daughter whose eyes had looked like that — Christ, just like that — when her father had died. 

Still, she was shaking her head. Her chin in that self-loathing crimp. “I can’t,” she said. 

“Yes,” he told her, though he didn’t know what, really. Anything. “Sure you can, Scully. It’s alright.” 

Scully took a deep breath. When she tore loose of herself it was with a shudder. The same rent-apart way she'd looked when she recalled burning spaceships with her hands open, or when she’d stepped through the doorway into his room, that first time. 

Upon him then, across the room, the dig of her forearm into the flesh of his neck like an incision, like that was how close she wanted to be: to the bone. The chair rattled.

“Hey,” he said, “hey, oh —” He put his arms around her ribs and spine. He put a hand in her hair to hold her and mean it. He said her name one more way, a way that wasn’t worth describing. 

Scully cried like to bring down high heaven. She cried like when she’d nearly had her heart torn out on his ratty living room floor. She cried in a way he’d never heard her cry before. 

Well, the entire point of Free is that it's a fake-out, right? In addition to positioning the film as going for a standard romantic resolution that will not actually happen, if you take a look at the lines there's a lot in there (as you noticed) that is wrong or just not how things work out. At the time of the song, both Rumi and Jinu are still caught up in the attitudes that have trapped them - Rumi's still trying to fix herself and Jinu is still trying to escape his past/shame. They aren't actually addressing their root issues and so their plan and their partnership fall apart.

I think that Golden, Takedown, and Free are all basically setting up points to be refuted by What it Sounds Like. Golden is a facade by all three of the girls - even as they sing about their past struggles they're not actually mentioning their true issues and Rumi in particular is lying her heart out. Takedown is an attempt to deal with demons (shame) by applying (self) hatred and violence to the problem. Free is an attempt to deal with deal with demons (shame) by locking it behind a Golden Honmoon (the past) and running away, basically. And all of these songs are earnest attempts but none of them work, because all of them are, in various ways, wrong. It's only by accepting their own patterns/flaws and coming together to support each other anyway that HUNTR/X were able to seal the Honmoon and defeat Gwi-Ma/shame.

Like just imagine, he’s sending in a report to Skinner, and adds something like “the suspect was also found to have frequently visited this website.” And it’s a rickroll.

Scully gets a text at three in the morning and it’s like “SCULLY YOU NEED TO SEE THIS” and it’s a link. And it’s a rickroll.

Mulder just texting people and finding ways to troll the shit out of everyone around him.

Mulder gets up to make a speech or something and he’s like, “One of the ways I’ve gotten myself to this moment is from the people around me. I’ve never thought about giving them up. I try my best not to let them down… I never run around and hurt them.”

And everyone’s confused in the audience and Scully’s sitting there front row trying not to go insane because she’s seen him do something like this so many times, everyone’s thinking it’s such a beautiful speech and she’s facepalming in the front row.

@rpepperpotshipssciencebros please forgive me for this one

dana scully in the x-files [10/?]

Citizen 354 was at almost the top of their list, not far behind 356. The reasons -- though obvious -- had been typed and ratified and re-typed and filed in alphabetical order. It’s the Captain who attempts to make first contact. 

It goes to voicemail. He frowns at the red phone under his heavy white fist. 

“Sir?” 

The long table, rows of curious, bespectacled eyes. “What did he say, sir?” 

The Captain scrubs an eye. He flips back and forth, forth and back, through the reasons, and the list, and wishes he weren’t so informed, so as to be able to wonder why. “Something,” he says, “about being sure to feed the fish.” 

-- 

“And I know it cannot be about that bog witch thing, Mulder,” Scully is saying, balancing a takeout bag against his door, propped on one knee, scrounging for her key, “because even you think it’s more likely to be ignus fatus than anything, and besides, the joke makes itself, it wasn’t,” she huffs, the bag sliding, the lock catching, “worth” - catch “taking” - catch “personally.” 

His apartment is empty, impersonally. Scully lets the takeout drop. It’s a Sunday. The calls go straight for voicemail -- since Friday. It’s me. Thinking about Marvin’s, but only if you’re free. It’s me, are you still mad about what I said in Hillsboro the other day? It’s me. Mulder? It isn’t funny. 

The perpetual dent in his couch just-so. The ripple of water light at his shelf and window. The fish tank, blue and eternal. Scully doesn’t tap the glass, just touches it as though to say: I am late. I am here. Hello. The bodies, two of them, tiny, weightless, waving. 

--